1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to decorating shoes, such as sports shoes or children's shoes, and is specifically concerned with decorating a shoe with removable decals such as stick-on tattoos.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is quite common for manufacturers to include various decorative designs on the shoes that they manufacture. For example, children's shoes typically are available with designs on their uppers and/or on visible portions of their heels. Such designs frequently include one or more decorative patterns, cartoon characters, sports team logos, or the like. Shoes having such designs are frequently quite popular, as they allow children to express their individual tastes.
Unfortunately, most such designs are permanently printed or sewn onto the shoe. As a result, if the wearer wishes to display a different design on his shoes, he must then purchase a different shoe bearing the desired design. However, this can be costly and often impractical. Consequently, it would be desirable to have a technique that would permit a pair of shoes to be decorated once, and then when the owner's taste changes or when the owner merely tires of that design, he could remove the design and replace it with another.
In the past, various attempts have been made to achieve this goal. However, each of these conventional attempts has had problems that made them largely impractical. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 4,852,276 concerns a shoe in which an insert having a design or logo is inserted in a frame on the shoe. Specifically, with this technique the insert is held in place using a combination of a lip portion of the frame and a pressure sensitive adhesive. However, this conventional technique has the disadvantage that the insert can be difficult for a child to place underneath the frame's lip. Furthermore, with this conventional technique the owner is constrained to use only inserts that are specifically sized for the shoe's insert frame.
Other techniques have used magnetic material (U.S. Pat. No. 5,740,557), velcro (U.S. Pat. No. 5,566,477), a combination of a frame having a lip and velcro (U.S. Pat. No. 5,800,900) and snaps (U.S. Pat. No. 5,673,501) to attach decorative articles to a shoe. However, magnetic material frequently does not hold well; a frame with a lip can be difficult to use, as noted above; and using velcro or snaps tends to make the decorative article protrude too far away from the shoe, increasing the likelihood that the decorative article will be pulled off if another object rubs against the shoe.
As a further alternative conventional attempt, U.S. Pat. No. 5,209,900 describes a shoe having a removable decorated shoelace cover, which is attached to the shoe by looping shoelaces through slots in the shoelace cover. However, with this technique the decorative article generally can only be placed over the shoelaces, thus severely limiting the shoe owner's ability to creatively decorate his shoes.
What is needed, therefore, is a more practical and easier to use technique for decorating and re-decorating shoes as desired.